Fallout 76 will be exclusive to Bethesda’s launcher, beta will be full game

I’m a relatively new PC gamer and my one big gripe with PC gaming is all the launchers I have to go through. Fortnite has the Epic Games Launcher and I highly doubt people are using that for anything else. Blizzard has Battle.Net which is a complete slog to get up. Uplay has always been awful. Origin is some sort of travesty. Having my games on Steam where they’re automatically updated and sorted into a neat alphabetic list is where it’s at, but publishers just love to push their own proprietary stuff on us. Bethesda is another one to join the countless shortcuts on my taskbar and it seems they’ll greedily be keeping Fallout 76 on the launcher.

This was confirmed by PC Gamer where a Bethesda representative has said that the “PC version of Fallout 76, for both the B.E.T.A. and the launch, will be available only via Bethesda.net, not on Steam”. I think that Fallout is so big that they believe that the release of this major multiplayer title will be a massive boost in the launcher’s adoption. The Epic Games Launcher has basically become one of the most used launchers ever simply because of Fortnite. The more people on the Bethesda launcher, the more likely they are to dabble in Bethesda’s other games as they’ll be staring you in the face every time you want to go into the wasteland with your buddies.

I might just be annoyed by the slight inconvenience that launchers make in my gaming life. I don’t like having to have so many services up at once that each want a piece of my bandwidth for updates. We have been spoiled with Steam’s universality, but it makes sense why a publisher would like to keep all of their eggs in their own basket.

Additionally, according to the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. FAQ, the beta will be the full game and all of the progress you make in it will be saved for the full release. That’s a pretty different tactic for a beta as they traditionally only include a snippet of the game so that they can test server strength and find any cheeky multiplayer bugs. So, theoretically, we’ll be able to see the full Fallout 76 experience already when it deploys in October. There obviously won’t be enough time to get the full experience unless you forgo sleep for a few days entirely, but it’s nice to see that we’ll be able to see this new venture in its entirety.